Cold Server
by CarpalTunnelLove
Summary: Sequel to 'Pots and Kettles' formerly called "The First Ten" . Five months have passed. Many things have changed for Edward Nigma and Jonathan Crane-but many things will always be the same. Not slash. T for suggestiveness/language, may become M.
1. Chapter 1

ONE: 'SCARS'

There was solace in darkness, comfort to be had in shadows. Eddie would be the first to admit it-second to embrace it, if the Batman counted for anything.

However, it was rather satisfying when one's first sight upon waking was proof of one's prowess.

Eddie couldn't help the grin that tugged at his mouth when, upon trying to rise, two voices mumbled in sleepy dissent and arms from two different directions attempted to pull him back down. He could just make them out in the dim light of morning, nearsighted as he was.

The woman was still dead to the world, just clingy in sleep. Her tousled mop of dark hair obscured her face almost entirely. Eddie gently lifted her scarlet-nailed hand from his arm, her many bangles jingling softly.

He sat up properly, wincing as the raw skin of his neck throbbed. He touched it cautiously, curiously, as a deep grumble issued from somewhere to his left.

"Sorry," he murmured, drawing the sheets back far enough to free his legs. His eyes lingered for a moment on the sprawled blond, on the intricate dragon tattoo that covered most of his back-blurry, at the moment, but no less impressive. The man-_Nate, was it?_-groaned again and shifted, but didn't get up. Nor did he move when Eddie climbed over him, off the bed, in search of his glasses-and perhaps his pants.

The first garment he picked up was a t-shirt; large, black, and torn rather badly. _Oops._ Well, that explained the scraps of black under a few of his nails.

The jeans that lay a little closer were dark green, definitely his. Eddie pulled them on gratefully. It just wouldn't do for the Riddler to be seen in a state of undress, the previous night's events notwithstanding.

_Those two might not even remember anyway_, he mused, shuffling into the adjoined bathroom. He couldn't remember how much they'd had to drink, even though he'd had none himself. He had been focusing on _other_ things.

He sighed, leaning on the counter, scrutinizing his reflection in the cracked mirror.

Eddie cringed inwardly. Bed-head and sex-hair had combined and formed a humiliating sort of tribute to Johnny Rotten. But it seemed that the previous night's activities had left him otherwise unblemished. This was fortunate; hair he could fix, even scrapes and bruises he could explain, but it was very hard to use the 'run-in-with-Batman' excuse in regards to bite marks.

He attempted to flatten the nest atop his head and winced in pain as his fingers brushed against the back of his neck.

Curious, he picked up the hand mirror that lay beside the sink, held it up behind his head to bounce the reflection back off the larger mirror.

The skin around the tattoo was still raw and red, hugging the smooth, elegant curves of the question mark. Eddie allowed himself a satisfied smile. To think, he had worried that he might regret the decision. Instead he mentally congratulated himself for good judgement.

He'd always rejected the idea of tattoos and other radical modifications, but perhaps that had been because he feared the pain necessary to the process.

And he knew pain. Oh yes. His fingers wandered absently to his left thigh, finding the precise spot even through dark denim. The scar.

He had many scars, he mused, both literal and figurative. They were scattered over every part of him; clean slices from countless blades, tears across his back and shoulders from his father's belt, jagged marks over his arms from years of glass and machinery, cigarette burns for 'lying'...

But this one, this relatively small, clean cut, outshone them all. The injury itself had been from a batarang, a mundane incident in his line of work. The pain had been excruciating, but the treatment expeditious and skilled. The stitches had been flawless and there had been no infection at all.

But his skin still crawled at the thought of those helping hands. Long, bony, cold.

Eddie shuddered, closing his eyes against the memory of Crane's horsey, freckled face, his ice-blue eyes, the high laugh. The dull, orange glow of a syringe.

He smiled bitterly. Perhaps he should thank the professor-his pain tolerance had rather increased since he had been made so aware of how many different kinds of pain there were. Physical pain _hurt_, but the agony inflicted by the Scarecrow lingered. It grew. If allowed, it consumed.

Eddie opened the tap, cold water rushing out over his hands, into the battered sink. He carded dripping fingers through his hair (the only way to make it behave), smiling as he remembered something a woman had once said about water taming fire. He hadn't bothered to commit her name to memory but he was fairly certain that it had been 'artistically' spelled and ended in '-ee.'

Hair thus tamed, he wandered back into the small bedroom, where Nate and his girlfriend (_Drew,_ he remembered suddenly) were collecting their various scattered garments. _Very_ scattered, in fact.

_Gold stars all around for enthusiasm, _Eddie thought, grinning, allowing the rush of images from the previous night to scrub his mind's eye clean of Crane. _For a given value of 'clean.' _

They both grinned when they saw him, clearly remembering as well.

"Sleep well?" The woman purred, her playfully seductive tone only slightly spoiled by the following grunt of effort as the brunette fished one of her bright red pumps from under the bed.

"Very," Eddie lied. He hadn't slept well in months, though admittedly the presence of two friendly bodies, neither of whom were at all opposed to what he could only describe as 'snuggling', had managed to ease him a little.

Large, warm fingers prodded the back of his neck. He winced, attempting to turn his head, but the other hand came to rest on his shoulder, holding him gently.

"Just looking," Nate's voice spoke from behind him. "Looks good."

"You do good work."

The tattoo artist made a soft noise of agreement.

Eddie sighed, brushing off the black-nailed hands. _And now, back to work._ One of hands took his arm, turning him around. _Or not. _

Concern marred the blond's otherwise handsome face.

"You okay?"

_No. Not for a long time and for a long time yet._

"Yeah. Fine."

Nate's eyes were kind. He looked away, pulling himself free, doing his best not to appear as unsettled as he actually was.

His gaze instead met Drew's. Mussed from sleep, her dark hair fell into her eyes in exactly the wrong way. Eyes that were exactly the wrong shade of blue.

He suppressed a shiver, Crane's face drifting once again across his mind's eye. He turned away, sat heavily on the bed, raking a hand through his hair.

"Ed-"

"You should go now." He knew he'd been abrupt. He expected that too-familiar chill to fall into his spurned bedmates' voices as they took their leave.

Instead, Nate's deep voice was quiet and level.

"Okay."

He looked up, surprised. The man's smile was a little too understanding for his liking. It wasn't as though the artist actually _knew_ anything, but to Eddie's experience body artists, cab drivers, and bartenders all seemed to have an uncanny knack for reading emotions.

"Okay. You have my number, call me. I want to see you in a couple days, make sure it's healing okay. Cool?"

"Fine."

As they left, the woman's bag snagged on something on a dresser, knocking it to the floor.

"Oh, sorry," she muttered, tossing it to Eddie, who caught it deftly without thinking. He nodded in thanks, not even noticing what it was until the two had disappeared.

_Cyrano._

He flipped through it hastily, realizing suddenly that he'd already come to a decision. He'd known the moment he woke up that today was the day.

He huffed impatiently, abandoning his search in favor of simply overturning the book and shaking it until the note fell out.

The sight of it still made him scowl. The nerve, the audacity, the arrogance of it.

_'Pots and kettles, Edward.'_ Purred a voice in his head, an echo of conversations long passed. _Shut up,_ he thought back at it.

" _'Thank you for your business...' _" He scoffed, "Asshole."

But he leaned over to the nightstand anyway, grabbed up his current phone.

"Riddle me this," he sighed to no-one in particular, "What is it that asks no questions but always needs an answer?"

He half hoped that the number wouldn't work, that five months had been too long to wait. But he'd already invested so much into the hope that Crane was patient.

He punched in the last number, waiting, praying conflicting prayers, fingering the scar on his leg even though he couldn't see it.

Ringing.

_Don't you dare pick up._

Ringing.

_ ..I swear to god if you don't pick up I will __**kill **__you._

Ringing.

_...__**Please **__don't pick up._

Ring-_CLICK._

A distorted chuckle.

"_Hello, __**Clarice**__." _


	2. Chapter 2

TWO: 'SMALL VICTORY'

Contrary to popular belief, Jonathan wasn't _always _working. At least, not in his lab.

It was, after all, only prudent to make repairs whenever a seam gave out.

He pushed his glasses back up his nose from where they had slipped a bit, the needle gliding smoothly through the worn, rough flannel of the damaged shirt.

...A certain ginger had once questioned his choice of attire. It had been more difficult than expected to swallow the retort that growing up in Georgia made one practically impervious to what northerners called 'heat.'

_Three, four, close the door..._

Not for the first time, Jonathan found himself precariously close to wishing that he still had Nigma to talk to. He had been lying low for the last month, after a particularly close encounter with the Bat, and patient man though he was, boredom had already begun to set in. He had been lying so low, in fact, that all his experiments and research had been put on hold.

Jonathan shifted in his chair, trying to shift his focus away from the unscratchable itch at the back of his mind. He paused in his mending, breathed deep. Control, patience, control.

One experiment continued, he must remember. His gaze fell, as it had so many times in the past months, to the sheet of paper tacked to the wall of his dingy little hideout, to its careful tally marks.

_Five, six, pick up sticks..._

Five months, three weeks, six days.

His longest running experiment yet. Also his simplest; rather than studying the subtle decay of the human psyche or researching the merit of this or that chemical formula, he was simply pitting Edward Nigma's two foremost traits, pride and curiosity, against one another.

Nigma would call, eventually. He had to. However violated, wounded-perhaps _frightened_-he was, the Riddler's curiosity would always win out.

_Seven, eight, lay them straight._

He allowed his thoughts to drift into memory; a vast, obsessively neat warehouse, a carefully crafted note pasted below curly letters that spelled out _Cyrano de Bergerac._

It had surprised him at the time how close Nigma's 'secret hideout' had been to his own. In truth it wasn't so much a hideout as a hidden harbor and a small boat, but it was still amusing that Nigma could've spent so much time outfitting his place without noticing.

It hadn't occurred to him until later to be insulted that Nigma had thought that he, the Scarecrow, required _his_ help. What a fool, to think that he could be the only person with secret places on the island.

_Nine, ten..._

An irritating, piercing electronic noise split the silence. Impossible, he didn't even _have _another phone yet...Wait. It wasn't...He couldn't help but laugh.

_Perfect timing for once, Nigma._

Jonathan dropped the shirt carelessly aside. It could wait, this could not. The obnoxious noise was spewing from under a pile of notebooks; he fished the phone out eagerly. He made no attempt to stifle the grin that spread wide across his cheeks.

_I knew it, Nigma, I win again, _he thought, savoring the moment, _I __**knew**__ you couldn't resist. _It had only taken five months for Nigma's pride to give out.

Best not lose him. He jabbed the button on the phone, another low laugh escaping.

"Hello, Clarice," he purred.

Silence for a moment, and half-imagined sounds of someone opening and closing their mouth as they searched for words. Then...

_"You keyed my bike, you son of a bitch."_

Of all the things Nigma might've said, that actually took Jonathan by surprise for a moment. He almost asked what Nigma was talking about, but then a memory drifted to the front of his mind.

_Rows of warehouses, dirty lamplight. Gravel and chunks of broken concrete crunched beneath his boots as he passed the motorcycle-now smeared with its owner's blood, black in the weak, yellowed light of predawn._

_ An idea occurred to him, wicked and childish. He fished in his pocket for a moment, drew out an empty needle. Then, with rather more relish than he would have cared to admit, dragged it slowly along the gas tank, the resulting screech music to his ears. _

"Actually, it was a needle."

_"It was a dick move. I should scratch your eyes out for scratching my baby."_

Jonathan suppressed a laugh at the petty threat. He hadn't felt this good in weeks, the fact that he didn't even have to speak to Nigma to get the better of him.

"You called to threaten me on its behalf?"

_"Would that surprise you?"_

"Not in the slightest. If memory serves, you were one of the most petty people I ever encountered." He chose his words carefully-'were', as though he'd already moved past any association.

_"But you remember me."_

"Vaguely."

He could practically hear Nigma's teeth grinding.

_"Been keeping busy?"_

"Relatively," Jonathan lied, "Don't know what _you_ have been up to..." This was another outright lie, as he knew for a fact that Nigma had been inactive for quite some time (there would have been no point to his little experiment if Nigma was simply _too busy _to think about him).

_"A little of this, a little of that."_

A pause, slightly awkward, but that was good. Nigma must think that Jonathan had nothing to say. Even though in truth there were a thousand questions burning holes in his brain. _What made you give in? Why did you call? What made you wait?_

_"...Riddle me this, Crane."_

He did not fail to notice that Nigma had used his surname instead of the usual overly-familiar 'Jonathan.'

"Very well, if you must."

_"You only have it until you've paid for it. What is it?"_

Jonathan considered for a moment.

"A debt." _Is that why you called? Fascinating. _"You feel that I owe you something?"

_"That-that was merely to break the silence."_

_Liar._

_ "...But I may have a proposition for you."_

_The hell,_ Jonathan thought, _We both know that's code for 'I need your help.' _

But he kept his voice level, with that edge of boredom that clearly still made Nigma squrim.

"Is that so?"

_"If you'll meet me, I'll tell you more."_

"And what makes you think I'm going to take time out of my own schedule just because you 'may' require my assistance?"

_"I don't need your help!" _Nigma snapped. Jonathan grinned while he paused, apperantly composing himself. When next he spoke, his voice only shook a little, telling though that slight tremor was.

"_Forgive me for making assumptions, Crane. I thought you'd __**want**__ to make three quarters of a million dollars in one go."_

"How mundane."

_"...Courtesy of the Gotham University board of directors."_

That piqued the interest of an entirely different part of Jonathan's mind. One that grinned.

"...I'm listening."

Nigma laughed, that irritating, smug laugh that he used just before he called someone an idiot.

_"Clearly you aren't. I already told you I'd tell you more-__**if**__ you meet me."_

Jonathan bit back a retort-_smug little bastard how would you like another session you childish slut..._ He kept his voice level.

"Your place or mine?"

_"How about neither?"_

Part of him resented playing Nigma's irritating, childish little games, but the opportunities presented were too promising to pass up.

"Very well. Where, then?"

_"Remember our first time?"_ Nigma crooned in a sickly impression of seduction, _"Meet me there. An hour. I know you're not busy."_

Memory drifted forth once more, not as images this time, but rather a sound.

Shattering glass, a loud curse, a soft _thump._

"Very well."


End file.
